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Authors: Richard Matheson

Duel (31 page)

BOOK: Duel
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He stood there silently and his mind spoke to him. There is a chance, it said, a chance.
She seemed to guess what he was thinking. Because she looked up at him and there was absolute trust in her eyes.
“Anything, David,
anything.
”
 
“Can you hear me, Ann?” he said.
“Yes,” she said.
They were in Professor Mead's office. Ann lay on the couch, her eyes closed. Mead took the needle from Collier's fingers and put it on the desk. He sat on the corner of the desk and watched in grim silence.
“Who am I, Ann?”
“David.”
“How do you feel, Ann?”
“Heavy. I feel heavy.”
“Why?”
“The baby is so heavy.”
Collier licked his lips. Why was he putting it off, asking these extraneous questions? He knew what he wanted to ask. Was he too afraid? What if, despite her insistence on this, she gave the wrong answer?
He gripped his hands together tightly and his throat seemed to become a column of rock.
“Dave, not too long,” Johnny cautioned.
Collier drew in a rasping breath.
“Is it …” he started, then swallowed with difficulty, “is it …
my
child, Ann?”
She hesitated. She frowned. Her eyes flickered open for a second, then shut. Her entire body writhed. She seemed to be fighting the question. Then the color drained from her face.
“
No,
” she said through clenched teeth.
Collier felt himself stiffening as if all his muscles and tendons were dough expanding and pushing out his flesh.
“Who's the father?” he asked, not realizing how loud and unnatural his voice was.
At that, Ann's body shuddered violently. There was a clicking sound in her throat and her head rolled limply on the pillow. At her sides, the white fists opened slowly.
Mead jumped over and put his fingers to her wrist. His face was taut as he felt for the pulsebeat. Satisfied, he lifted her right eyelid and peered at the eye.
“She's really out,” he said. “I told you it wasn't a good idea to give serum to such a heavily pregnant woman. You should have done it months ago. Kleinman won't like this.”
Collier sat there not hearing a word, his face a mask of hopeless distress.
“Is she all right?” he asked.
But the words hardly came out. He felt something shake in his chest. He didn't realize what it was until it was too late. Then he ran shaking hands over his cheeks and stared at the wet fingers with incredulous eyes. His mouth opened, closed. He tried to cut off the sobs but he could not.
He felt Johnny's arm around his shoulders.
“It's all right, boy,” Johnny said.
Collier jammed his eyes shut, wishing that his whole body could be swallowed up in the swimming darkness before his gaze. His chest heaved with trembling breaths and he couldn't swallow the lump in his throat. His head kept shaking slowly. My life is ended, he thought, I loved and trusted her and she has betrayed me.
“Dave?” he heard Johnny say.
Collier grunted.
“I don't want to make things worse. But … well, there's still a hope, I think.”
“Huh?”
“Ann didn't answer your question. She didn't say the father was … another man,” he finished weakly.
Collier pushed angrily to his feet.
“Oh
shut up
, will you?” he said.
Later they carried her to the car and Collier drove her home.
 
Slowly he took off his coat and hat and let them drop on the hall chest. Then he shuffled into the living room and sank down on his chair. He lifted his feet to the ottoman with a weary grunt. He sat there, slumped over, staring at the wall.
Where was she?—he wondered. Upstairs reading probably, just as he'd left her this morning. She had a pile of library books by the bed. Rousseau, Locke, Hegel, Marx, Descartes, Darwin, Bergson, Freud, Whitehead, Jeans, Eddington, Einstein, Emerson, Dewey, Confucius, Plato, Aristotle, Spinoza, Kant, Schopenhauer, James—an endless assortment of books.
And the way she read them. As if she were sitting there and rapidly turning the pages without even looking at what was written on them. Yet he knew she was getting it all. Once in a while she'd let a phrase drop, a concept, an idea. She was getting every word.
But why?
Once he had gotten the wild idea that Ann had read something about acquired characteristics and was trying to pass along this knowledge to her unborn child. But he had quickly put aside that idea. Ann was intelligent enough to know that such a thing was patently impossible.
He sat there shaking his head slowly, a habit he'd acquired in the past few months. Why was he still with her? He kept asking himself the question. Somehow the months had slipped by and still he was living in this house. A hundred times he'd started to leave and changed his mind. Finally he'd given up and moved into the back bedroom. They lived now like landlord and tenant.
His nerves were starting to go. He found himself obsessed with an overwhelming impatience. If he was walking from one place to another
he would suddenly feel a great rush of anger that he had not already completed the trip. He resented all transport, he wanted things done immediately. He snapped at his pupils whether they rated it or not. His classes were being so poorly conducted that he'd been called before Doctor Peden, the head of the Geology Department. Peden hadn't been too hard on him because he knew about Ann but Collier knew he couldn't go on like this.
His eyes moved over the room. The rug was thick with dust. He'd tried going over it with the vacuum whenever he thought of it, but it piled up too fast to keep pace with. The whole house was going to pot. He had to take care of his laundry. The machine in the basement hadn't been used for months. He didn't want to know how to operate it and Ann never touched it now. He took the clothes to the laundromat downtown.
When he'd commented once on the slovenliness of the house, Ann had looked hurt and started to cry. She cried all the time now and always the same way. First, as if she were going to continue for an hour straight. Then, suddenly, with lurching abruptness, she would stop crying and wipe away the tears. He got the impression sometimes that it had something to do with the child, that she stopped for fear the crying would affect the baby. Or else it was the other way around, he thought, that the baby didn't like …
He closed his eyes as if to shut out the thought. His right hand tapped nervously and impatiently on the arm of the chair. He got up restlessly and walked around the room running a forefinger over flat surfaces, wiping the dust off on his handkerchief.
He stood staring malignantly at the heap of dishes in the sink, the unkempt condition of the curtains, the smeared linoleum. He felt like rushing upstairs and letting her know that, pregnancy or no pregnancy, she was going to snap out of this doldrum and act like a wife again or he was leaving.
He started through the dining room, then halfway to the stairs he
hesitated, halted completely. He went back to the stove slowly and put the flame on underneath the coffee pot. The coffee would be stale but he'd rather drink it that way than make more.
What was the use? She'd try to talk to him and tell him she understood but then, as if she were under a spell, she'd start to cry. And, after a few moments, she'd get that startled look and stop crying. As a matter of fact she was even beginning to control her tears from the outset. As if she knew that the crying was not going to work so she may as well not start at all.
It was eerie.
The word brought him up short. That was it—eerie. The pneumonia. The decrease in fetal size. The reading. The desire for salt. The crying and the stopping of it.
He found himself staring at the white wall over the stove. He found himself shuddering.
Ann didn't tell us the father was another man.
 
When he came in she was in the kitchen drinking coffee. Without a word he took the cup from her and poured the remainder of it into the sink.
“You're not supposed to drink coffee,” he said.
He looked into the coffee pot. He'd left it almost full that morning.
“Did you drink
all
of it?” he asked angrily.
She lowered her head.
“For God's sake, don't cry,” he rasped.
“I … I won't,” she said.
“Why do you drink coffee when you know you're not supposed to?”
“I just couldn't stand it anymore.”
“
Oh-h,
” he said, clenching his teeth. He started out of the room.
“David, I can't help it,” she called after him, “I can't drink water. I have to drink
something.
David, can't—can't you! …”
He went upstairs and took a shower. He couldn't concentrate on anything. He put down the soap and then forgot where. He stopped
shaving before he was done and wiped off the lather. Then, later, while he was combing his hair, he noticed half his face still bearded and, with a muffled curse, he lathered again and finished.
The night was like all the others except for one thing. When he went into the bedroom for clean pajamas he saw that she was having difficulty focusing her eyes. And, while he lay in the back bedroom correcting test papers, he heard her giggling. Later he tossed around for several hours before he slept and all that time she kept giggling at something. He wanted to slam the door shut and drown out the sound but he couldn't. He had to leave the door open in case she needed him during the night.
At last he slept. For how long he didn't know. It seemed only a moment before he lay there blinking up at the dark ceiling.
“Now am I alien and forgotten, 0 lost of traveled night.”
First he thought he was dreaming.
“Murk and strangeness, here am I in ever night, hot, hot.”
He sat up suddenly then, his heart jolting.
It was Ann's voice.
He threw his legs over the side of the bed and found his slippers. He pushed up quickly and padded to the door, shivering as the cold air chilled the rayon thinness of his pajamas. He moved into the hall and heard her speaking again.
“Dream of goodbyes, forsaken, plunged in swelling liquors, cry I for light, release me from torment and trial.”
All spoken in a singsong rhythm, in a voice that was Ann's and not Ann's, more high-pitched, more tense.
She was lying there on her back, her hands pressed to her stomach. It was moving. He watched the flesh ripple under the thinness of her nightgown. She should have been chilled without any blankets but she seemed warm. The bedside lamp was still on, the book—
Science and
Sanity,
Korzjbski
—fallen from her fingers and lying half open on the mattress.
It was her face. Sweat drops dotted it like hundreds of tiny crystals. Her lips were drawn back from her teeth.
Her eyes wide open.
“Kin of the night, sickened of this pit, 0 send me not to make the way!”
He felt a horrible fascination in standing there listening to her. But she was in pain. It was obvious from her whitened skin, the way her hands, like claws, raked the sheet at her sides into mounds of wadded, sweat-streaked cotton.
“I cry, I cry,”
she said
. “Rhyuio Gklemmo Fglwo!”
He slapped her face and her body lurched on the bed.
“He again, the hurting one!”
Her lips spread wide in a scream. He slapped her again and focus came to her eyes. She lay there staring up at him in complete horror. Her hands jumped to her cheeks, pressing against them. She seemed to recoil into the bed. Her pupils shrank to pinpoints in the milk-white of her eyes.
“No,” she said. “
No!
”
“Ann, it's me, David! You're all right!”
She looked uncomprehendingly at him for a long moment, her breasts heaving with tortured breaths.
Then, suddenly, she was relaxed and recognized him. Her lower jaw went slack and a moan of relief filled her throat.
He sat down beside her and took her in his arms. She clung to him, crying, her face into his chest.
“All right, baby, let it out, let it out.”
Again. The choking off of sobs, the suddenly dried eyes, the pulling away from him, the blank look.
“What is it?” he asked.
BOOK: Duel
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ads

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